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Measuring Road Roughness through Crowdsourcing while Minimizing the Conditional Effects

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Abstract

A well-maintained road network is a crucial factor for sustainable urban development. Over the past few years, researchers have proposed smartphone-based crowdsourced applications as a low-cost effective solution to acquire frequent road surface quality updates. One of the main limitations faced by these applications is that the collected values exhibit significant variations over the conditions under which the road data was collected. This study is an attempt to develop a road roughness monitoring platform using passenger cars that can produce accurate results while reducing the effect of these conditions such as the car type, smartphone model, or its placement. The developed system consists of several features including automatic journey detection, freedom to use any smartphone in any position with or without an active internet connection when collecting data, converging values collected from different sources, and visualizing them in a virtual map. A set of field tests were carried out to evaluate the proposed system based on the road condition, passenger car type, smartphone model, and smartphone placement inside the vehicle. The results show that the proposed solution is effective in predicting accurate values after reducing the effect of these varying factors.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) Operation of the Ministry of Higher Education, Sri Lanka funded by the World Bank. Also, we acknowledge the support received from the Senate Research Committee Grant, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

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  1. University of Moratuwa, Katubedda, 10400, Sri Lanka

    Y. T. Gamage, T. A. I. Thotawaththa & A. Wijayasiri

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  1. Y. T. Gamage
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Gamage, Y.T., Thotawaththa, T.A.I. & Wijayasiri, A. Measuring Road Roughness through Crowdsourcing while Minimizing the Conditional Effects. Int. J. ITS Res. 20, 581–601 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13177-022-00312-6

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